User Experience Essentials for The Best SEO

Updated on March 3rd, 2025 at 03:20 pm

Which content design and user experience elements are most important for SEO?

SEO for modern content isn’t about stuffing keyword, aggressive popups forcing users to subscribe or hugely lengthy pieces designed to keep the user reading for hours.

Making your content more interactive, more user friendly and quicker and easier to navigate through for your customers are key considerations to help you stand out.

These tips and features will help you optimise your content for long term performance and ensure you display content in the best way so your content adds meaningful value to users searching and discovering your website pages.

With some suggesting that SEO and user experience go hand in had here are the the elements to prioritise adding to your website which can aid your organic search growth.

Here are most important content design and UX elements to implement on your website that could help improve the SEO performance of content on your website.

Get this guide as a google doc and share it with your clients to help get buy in for CMS updates and content design elements as part of your SEO strategy.

We’ve colour codes each recommendation made in this guide to help you understand their importance and value to the SEO performance of your website, see the key below to understand more.

🔴 – high value, highly critical content element for your CMS. Get this implemented.

🟠 – valuable content element for your CMS. Adding this element should provide value to your SEO performance

🟡 – some value depending on the niche you operate in and the type of content you offer.

🟢 – valuable to your website in the right circumstances, for the right types of content and users.

Above the Fold (Arguably)

These are content elements to add at the top of pages or in the area of the page known as “above the fold”.

While it isn’t critical that these are added to the top of every website page you produce, these features can improve engagement, conversion potential and your chances of being discovered by search engine users when implemented correctly.

Above the fold has always been one of the most important areas for SEO professionals and their optimisation efforts because it is content that is seen by the highest number of users landing on a page and is almost always guaranteed to be rendered by search engine crawlers.

Breadcrumbs – 🔴

Breadcrumbs get a bad press because the assumption by many is that they can kill conversion. This, I’ve always found to be an odd take because they’re fairly harmless and there’s very little they actually do to inhibit user progress through your website.

Admittedly, breadcrumbs can sometimes be considered ugly or superfluous when they appear above the fold, but including them on your indexable pages is important because they help search engines understand relationships between pages, they help users navigate quickly and they help search engines understand hierarchical relationships and content category hubs too.

To note, breadcrumbs don’t have to appear above the fold or at the top of pages. Many sites move them down to the foot of pages to declutter their page headers above the fold and prevent any possibility of conversions dropping.

Forbes vary the location of their breadcrumbs some appear just above the footer others are above the fold.

Fender online store breadcrumbs above the fold at the top of their product page.

In This Guide / Guide Table of Contents Quick Scroll – 🔴

Table of contents can help you navigate from the top of the page to specific areas of interest within your content.

You may think these features are only necessary on long copy content pages or blog posts but they can be useful on pages where you’re trying to sell products too.

This is especially true if you are selling highly complex or Y.M.Y.L products like healthcare or drugs products, financial services or offering legal advice.

On product pages, a review score or star rating above the fold also makes sense and allowing users to click this to scroll down to where reviews are included on the product page for additional detail makes sense because they can quickly help users understand why your product is valuable, what it offers over competitor products and why previous customers love the item or service.

Some of the best examples of table of contents from around the internet include;

Money Saving Expert have always done this well, linking to both H2s and H3s on their pages from an “In this guide” sidebar and mid content links to products.

GoCompare also have a nice “jump to” list of links, however the functionality is limited to H2s only when including the option for users to jump to H3s would also be useful for users.

Published Date – 🔴

Published dates are useful for helping users understand when the content was written and the context around the articles on your date of publication.

You should aim for your publication date to stay static while updating your last updated date, see below, whenever you make an update to the content.

Including a published date helps users and search engines understand your expertise on a topic because it clarifies how long you’ve been covering a topic for.

A user may place more trust in a publication that has long been an expert in a particular topic or field, so transparency here is valuable.

Last Updated Date – 🔴

Last updated date is great for understanding when content is updated and how important a page is to your website.

Search engines such as Google tend to attribute more “importance” to pages that you update frequently and therefore, potentially ranking increases for these pages too.

Factor in “fresh content boosts” which many SEO’s and marketing professionals consider as a quick win for SEO and you’ll be flying.

Examples of last updated dates aren’t difficult, most online publishers use them now as a staple feature of their digital content.

Content Summary, TLDR or Key Takeaways – 🔴

This is a critical page element for modern organic search performance and optimisation.

As Google continues to adapt to battle sites like TikTok, AI tools like ChatGPT and Bing AI, optimising your site to ensure that you’re giving users both quick summary content early on at the top of the page and more detailed content below you’re covering all types of user those who want to skim read a subject and those who want the full picture, at least in Google’s eyes.

Whether you appreciate the quality of Business Insider’s content or not, they use bullet point TLDR’s effectively to summarise content succinctly for users.

Guide Content Reading Time – 🟠

Reading time is a way to help engage your users because it will help them understand how long they will have to take to commit to finish reading your content piece.

By being transparent, you’ll be able to help users understand whether they want to read everything in your article in detail or whether they’d prefer to skim read the passages of the text that they’re specifically interested in.

🔴 – Read This Guide [Content] to Me – Text To Audio

While relatively new to the world of above the fold content, this is one of the areas we’re likely to see rapid growth of through 2025.

AI tools will make implementation of this type of embedded on page “reader” tool simpler to add and more beneficial for users across a range of complex topics.

One site which has gone all in on adding text to speech content within the pages is health website turnTo. They’ve also made some big claims about the growth of their SEO performance.

With AI, specific introductions can be customised with AI readers cleaning up language and helping the content flow.

I would recommend ensuring that;

• read aloud software fits with both the audience you’re marketing to and the content you’re writing (not all products and services will fit with this)
• content you’re writing is built to be read aloud (or optimised to ensure that people aren’t confused by the details)
• Graphical and statistical data will take a lot of description or editing and optimisation to deliver information clearly

It is clearly a bit of a game changer and can help you turn static web content into scripts which you can then use to promote on YouTube, as video content as well as through socials, speeding up your content re-marketing.

I would also recommend ensuring that re-aloud is something that your users will want to engage with before you implement it.

If the topic isn’t something they want read out loud on the train on the way to work, think carefully about whether there is value for your audience.

Adding features like timestamps, chapters and specific section identifiers to help users follow along with any relevant sections on your pages also make sense.

Within Content Where Relevant to Use

It isn’t just above the fold content elements that matter for SEO. Elements and features that appear within or alongside content can also have a big impact on page engagement and the SEO performance of your pages and website.

Here are the top features to include within content on your pages to help maximise user engagement, and help your SEO.

Top Tips, Expert Quotes and, Did You Know Stand Out Content Blocks – 🔴

Ensuring that you’re helping to build expert authority within your pages as well as externally by gaining backlinks is critical for SEO.

As well as making outreach and link building activity faster and more efficient including expert opinion on your pages is a fantastic way to prove your authority on a topic to users and search engines.

Ensure that, where relevant and possible to do so, you’re including expert opinions from trusted and reliable sources to help give your users specific examples of your expertise.

Money Saving Expert’s need to knows interactive box, great for both content and PR driven SEO.

money UK offer expert quotes directly within content.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) – 🟡

FAQs are a very popular feature of many websites. They offer a simple way for webmasters to help ensure that they’re covering topics in detail while offering a simple layout and easy to understand format.

Even if you’re only using <h3> headings and regular paragraphs to create FAQ sections, they can still be very valuable to your users.

This is especially true if you’re marking up your FAQS with appropriate FAQ schema markup to help search engines understand them as a content feature of your webpage.

Forbes have embraced interactive FAQs, using them with abundance on both comparison pages, above and informational content long copy pages, see below.

Customisable Related Content Sidebar – 🟠

You’ll want each webpage on your site to include links to related content both within the content itself and include links as a related sidebar or block which will help surface relevant content to both website users and search engine bots.

Even better, if you’re able to customise the links you include as part of this sidebar, you’ll have ultimate control over which pages are linked to most frequently from pages on your site meaning you’ll be able to increase internal link counts to these pages.

We’d also recommend configuring multiple instances of related link blocks on your website so you can include links to multiple sets of different pages, depending on the purpose of the link block.

For example, large and content heavy sites which frequently publish content could benefit from the following types of related links blocks to display on each of their long copy content pages;

• Most popular content – a list of 5 – 7 links to the most popular articles on the website, popularity can be based on organic clicks to the pages or overall page views from all source types – (reason, this will help increase link count to well established high performing pages and improve performance further). These pages can be category relevant or the most popular of all pages, depending on the specificity of your site to it’s niche.
• Newly published content – a list of 5 – 7 links of the newest content pages published on the site. This is a good way to quickly increase internal link counts to new content pages when traditionally internal linking to new pages isn’t always top of mind or easy to implement. By including a link block specifically for new content, discovery of the new content can be accelerated. Acceleration of content discovery can be important for getting content indexed quickly which can help ensure revenue is generated from content pages immediately. So, link blocks that specifically exist to surface new content pages, either sitewide or topic specific makes a considerable amount of sense for medium and large websites.
• Related content – a block specifically for the most closely related topics to the one the user has been reading about are very important to include because they can offer the user information around the “next step” or “previous step” of the topic they are trying to learn more about. For example, a detailed content page about completing an application form to apply for a credit card could effectively link to related topics like; “how to transfer a balance to a new credit card” and “how to pay your credit card bill” or a content page like; “what are the best types of credit card”. A user interested in application and the details they’ll need to provide could equally be interested in the types of credit card they can consider or understanding how to manage payments for the new credit card they are applying for. Providing a convenient way for users to access understand subtopics related to the topic they have searched for which has dropped them on your website is an effective way to improve engagement with your pages and help prove to search engines that you have a detailed and thorough understanding of the entirety of a content topic.

You are free to create any types of internal link blocks which display whichever types of content you wish but we’ve found the above examples to be very beneficial to clients and broadly applicable to almost every sector, niche and topic.

We’re switching back to Forbes for a good example of this here, they’ve found a way to scale their website through thousands of pages and topics effectively using related internal link blocks.

From a single investing page, Forbes are able to link out to around 40 pages which are closely related and likely, given the titles, incredibly popular search queries.

You can see from the related link block titles that these are customisable blocks. For example a “New to investing” related link block would make no sense in the pet insurance category.

Interactive lists – checklists, tools and quizzes – 🔴

Interactive lists, checklists, calculators, quizzes, maps and interactive infographics are a fantastic content variation to focus on because they can add engaging visuals to your content as well as help you to gather data about your users, their situation and their preferences.

For example, quizzes and surveys can be a great way to have users begin a conversion journey in a fun and interesting way that allows you to capture data about your customers which can be useful at a later date.

Calculators offer a great way for users to conveniently solve specific problems and calculate specific numbers they’re interested in. Data capture of inputted calculator values can also provide opportunities for you to create content too.

Even relatively basic interactive content, like checklists of items to take on a holiday or how to plan for a festival can be useful for users and provoke engagement in your content above average levels which could help your pages rank better.

Infographics offer a great way to visualise a topic or set of information to allow those who are more visually minded absorb information from your content. Or provide alternative ways for you to display additional angles of information.

Try to think about ways you can simplify user problems and provide calculators and tools to help them solve the issues rather than only focusing on long copy content.

nerdwallet embed quizzes and interactive features on their content to promote engagement.

Interactive Elements in Content – Open and Close Content Sections, Carousels and Personalised Content for Users Tables, Ordered Lists and Bullet Point Lists – 🟡

Extra types of interactive elements can help make content simpler for users to engage with and clearer so they’re better able to understand information.

For example, adding expandable content widgets, openable and closable carousels, ordered lists and bullet pointed lists can also help you include extra related information on pages that might help pick up search queries to rank for without overwhelming users with a barrage of information upfront.

With modern SEO, it isn’t just about the words you use on the page but how these words are displayed to help users fully engage with and understand your content.

When users start engaging, your content is simpler to categorise as “helpful” and helpful content that assists users is what Google is seeking to prioritise in it’s rankings today.

Ensure, above all else, that your content provides value to users, while targeting relevant search queries and is displayed in a way that is clear and easy for users to navigate and use and you’ll be offering helpful and useful content.

Things like numbered lists can be great for providing users specific instructions while unordered lists can be perfect for helping summarise the key points or important distinctions for the topics you are covering.

Google offer some of the best examples here, with interactive table elements and free examples to easily copy out of their content.

Language Translation Options – 🟡

Specifically pertinent for international websites and those operating across borders and overseas is on the fly language translation.

Again, this isn’t relevant to everyone, especially where;

• the audience type of choice is limited to a single geo
• the content is intricate, in-depth and specific to an audience (e.g. health or medical, where content might reference GPs in the U.K. but need to be carefully updated to reflect alternative medical service types when abroad).
• there’s no value in overseas targeting or translation, sure you could translate blog content but unless it offers specific benefits to offer the same content in alternative languages then it might represent significant lift without tangible return

Accessibility Features Dashboard – 🟡

Creating content accessible to all web users, whatever their specific needs, requirements or special accessibility requirements should be high on people’s list of things to consider when creating content.

Ensuring that users can customise elements of your content on website pages by adjusting;

• font size
• visual displays
• use of screen readers
• contrast ratios
• colours used in pages
• any other accessibility options

Will help make your content broadly more accessible, engaging and well used by your audience whatever their physical or mental capabilities.

Clarify External Links – 🟡

Widely forgotten and rarely used is the clarification of external links to users of your site with a small but clear symbol alongside links which point away from the domain the user is on.

Clarity on which links are external can help users understand what will happen if they choose to click and can help engagement with your pages.

Google include features like this commonly across their support pages.

MoneyHelper also include clear markup to users for links which point externally.

Guide Content Progress Bar – 🟢

Similar to an estimation of reading time for the user at the top of the page, a “guide progress bar” can be a useful inclusion on long copy content pages.

Progress bars generally take the form of a coloured bar which “fills” as the user scrolls further through the content on the page.

Similar in style to how installation progress bars work when you’re installing a new app or program on your computer, these reading progress bars can be a helpful way for users to understand and visualise how far through a piece of content they are and how much more there is left to go.

If they’ve already found the answer to the specific question they had, then ensuring your document is well linked to relevant pages makes sense so they can continue their research and discovery on another of your website pages.

ft.com implement a guide content progress bar as a small circle which fills with a purple line as you progress through the content on the page.

Once you’ve “read” all of the content, the circle updates to become a filled purple disc with a satisfying check mark included.

This helps users clearly understand they’ve “ticked” off an article from their list.

Below or Alongside Content

As well as the top of the page, design elements within content and alongside the content can also have an impact on your SEO efforts. Here are some of the most beneficial onpage elements to add to your webpage either below or alongside the main content of your webpages.

Improved Authorship Bio – 🟢

Authorship bios are a slightly controversial topic in SEO circles today, with many swearing by the “authority” boost a great authorship bio can offer countered by the skepticism that many SEO’s hold for the whole E.E.A.T aspect of SEO which Google have developed.

However, with larger and larger numbers of publishers creating content online, there is arguably some benefit in creating high quality and detailed authorship bio information to sit at the foot of content pages they’ve helped create.

Authorship bios tend to include a snippet of information about the author, a picture and commonly link back to an authorship page where users can find out even more about the author and discover more of their content.

Some authorship bios also link to the social media accounts for the individuals involved in the content production, so can be an effective way for users to verify the expertise of the person who has created the content.

So why are authorship pages valuable? Well, they can offer a quick and easy way for users to understand the expertise of someone who’s detailing information, it can also help users trust the content more because they may be familiar with the author or a fan of their work.

Outside of the trust and expertise benefits, authorship bios that link back to authorship pages can also provide and effective and alternative link structure to help group different content pieces together.

If your authors are well known in the industry as speakers or contributors, search engine users looking for more information may surface your content and become familiar with your website.

When deciding on whether you should include authorship bios on content pages on your website, consider whether you find online content more or less engaging depending on whether you knew who produced it?

We’d really only strongly recommend improved, detailed authorship pages in particular niches where content requirements fall into a Y.M.Y.L category (your money, your life) because these are the most important areas to establish trust in your expertise levels.

Healthline offer two authorship elements on content pages, an above the fold brief summary which includes details of the author and expert medical reviewer and the expanded author bio page at the foot of the content with links to related content and social profiles.

Authorship Pages – 🟡

Closely related to authorship bios are authorship pages. Author pages can consolidate the content and specific work created by the contributors to your website.

By grouping all of their content together with links to it from each article they’ve written you can create a webpage which ranks for your website author names, if they’re well known in the industry and are searched for.

If you’re creating content relevant to specific topics you can use authorship pages to help rank these topically relevant pages with links from the author hub page to the topical category pages and with links to each individual post created by the content creator.

You can link out to social media pages belonging to your authors too, for extra trust and authority in your content creators.

We don’t think authorship pages are essential for every website however in some niches where trust and expertise levels in the content you create should be high, it is worth creating these pages to prove to users how “expert” your content creators are.

Internal Link blocks to specific relevant content – 🟠

Sometimes you can link to related content from links embedded nicely within your pages i.e. it is simple enough to add a link from the section of a guide where you talk about a specific product or service and link naturally, however it can sometimes be difficult to squeeze a link in to a highly relevant page where the correct anchor text doesn’t work or where there just isn’t a relevant section to link from.

More frequently, you may have a better, more relevant page to link to about a particular topic, but may also want to link to a revenue generating page as an alternative option.

For instances like the above examples, a link callout block or “highlighted link” section may be the perfect solution.

If correctly implemented, the link blocks can present an attractive, clickable and interactive element for users to engage with which pushes them to a page of interest without you having to adjust the editorial copy to suit your preferred destination.

Above, the most useful link for the user here is to the blog post “Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research” however, the best link for the business, SEMrush is a link to their paid tool, so they’ve created a curated internal link block allowing them to link to both pages from the same location in a content piece.

Change Log – 🟡

A relatively new feature of some webpages is a change log or change tracker. This essentially tells users when the article was last updated, who made the updates and displays an historical timeline of all the updates made to a piece since it was published.

Change logs are useful for users because they help highlight how recently information was updated which can help readers understand when the content was last updated so they can determine whether new information added is relevant to them or is anything has changed since they last read the piece.

In reality, this is probably more useful for search engines like Google, who tend to prefer pages which are frequently updated. A detailed history of updates will allow search engines to easily calculate update frequency and determine “page importance” to your site.

A great example of a well known brand effectively using “change tracking” is Healthline, who include a detailed update log on their long copy content pages:

Quick Scroll Back to the Top – 🟡

Especially important for long product pages or commercially valuable pages is a quick scroll back to the top of the page button.

Assuming your most relevant, useful and high importance product details are listed at the top of your webpages, which, for the sake of conversions they really should be, you’ll want to create an easy way for users who would like to buy your product to quickly navigate back to the top of the page.

For example, if you sell trainers made from eco friendly and sustainable materials online and you detail the specific make up of the trainers in an FAQs section midway down the page, you’ll want to include a quick scroll option to return the user to the top of the page so they can pick; colour options and shoe sizes before they place an order.

For longer copy content, comparison sites and informational content there’s less need for the feature, however, remember, you may often be including the most valuable internal links within the first few paragraphs of your guides, so enabling this option can be helpful for users and get them back to the location of links, conversion blocks most valuable to you.

finder use a small arrow at the right of the screen to allow users to navigate to the top of the page quickly.

MSE use a static sidebar with a “back to the top” option for ultimate clarity.

Social Proof Elements – 🟢

Social proof elements can be a great way to show how popular a webpage, product or service is. Similar to how reviews work but scaled up, these can be a useful way to help users and search engines understand the popularity of a content page or how useful it is for users.

Good examples of ways to implement social proof elements on a webpage are things like;

• social share counters; i.e. every time your article is shared, +1 is added to your share count. When you have large quantities of highly shareable content it’ll ˙help; encourage more users to share and highlight to Google that your content is “popular”. If you’re prefer, you can breakdown share counters by social media platform and help understand whether users are sharing your content to public platforms or via more private social media types.
• read by counter; similar to a share counter but a total of the number of visitors who’ve visited and “read” your content. Defining “read” can be done by considering stats like scroll depth, time spent on the page and other engagement tells.
• clicks, interactions and even print counts; if you have a piece of content which is highly interactive, contains clickable elements or is a document that you’re encouraging users to print then you can implement a type of counter to show the number of users who’ve benefited from using your content previously.

The benefits of this type of data capture are multi-faceted too. You can use stats like this to help understand which content pieces on your site are most popular, how users commonly share your content and allow you to refine how you seed out your content going forward.

For example, the article most commonly shared to Facebook by your visitors would likely be a strong candidate to post on to your Facebook page and perhaps promote as part of paid ads on the platform too.

Certain retailers use this type of “social proof” effectively on product pages too. Helping to create a sense of urgency for customers looking at products on their website. For example Argos;

Badges are used highlighting how products on argos.co.uk are “selling fast” or “in demand” based on user engagement over time.

YouTube also lean heavily on social proof with comment counts, likes and dislikes and the all important video view counter which shows how many views a video gets overtime. There’s even a trending ranking for the video within a category.

Social Share Buttons – 🟢

Websites with the best and most consistent SEO traffic levels and performance correlate well with the sites that are active on social media and gain traffic from social media users.

This is often because the focus for these sites is on building a business, rather than just winning at SEO.

If you want to boost your SEO, getting your users to assist you by sharing your content across social media can be invaluable and help deliver more traffic, routes to your content and overall success.

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Doing SEO on a broken CMS?

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Published on: 01/02/2024